STEVE BACKLEY ON SYDNEY, HIS CHALLENGERS, TEAM MATES AND THE FUTURE! As I enter the plush hotel lobby of the Gosforth Park Hotel, Newcastle, just four hours after competition has ended at the last major domestic meeting of the season - the Norwich Union Gateshead Classic - I find Steve Backley and his fiancee Finnish triple jumper record holder (14.34m) Heli Koivula sitting together drinking, waiting patiently for my arrival. I’m an hour late and mine is not the first interview they have undergone that evening but Steve and Heli are as always, calm and relaxed. Steve Backley in an illustrious athletics career highlighted by three consecutive European titles, three World records - rough tailed model included - two World silvers and an Olympic bronze in 1992 and silver in 1996, has always personified the ultimate in confidence and self belief. As we order drinks, you know Backley will always describe his glass as being half full, never half empty. Backley is an optimist and it is a positive outlook born from the knowledge that whether fit or not, he is one of the world’s greatest competitors. His 1996 Olympic silver medal was a testimony to this competitiveness, as after injury having had only two competitions, Steve came within a metre of the gold medal. As Finland’s World champion Aki Parviainen conceded at the recent British Grand Prix at Crystal Palace, “Steve is a very, very dangerous man!”. Backley’s view on the Sydney Olympics is quite straight forward. “Looking at the javelin this year there are five or six athletes in with a shout for the win in Sydney. Going by the past stats at major championships, in Sydney one of these five is going to get injured, two are going to do all right, one is going to do pretty good and one is going to do fantastic. It’s not going to be like everyone will be on top form and I just have to be the one that does really good! It’s as simple as that” smiles Steve. Despite his recent chastisement of the national press for not giving the javelin, “Britain’s most successful athletics event” the coverage it was due, Backley is the first to recognise that he has not shown the necessary form this summer to feature on many pundits’ Sydney medal list. His 86.70 metre win at the AAA’s was certainly a great boost but his only consistent 84 -85 metre series of competitive throws came with his second place behind Aki Parviainen at Crystal Palace. Yet this does not worry Backley. “You know the javelin, it is not a predictable event. Who in 1997 would have thought Marius Corbett would have taken the World championship gold. The same is true with Seppo Raty in 1987 when he burst on to the scene or in 1994 and 1996 when Seppo came back from injury to take silver behind me in the European championships and then the bronze in Atlanta. Seppo had even fewer competitions than me in 1996! I’m similar to Seppo competitively, he threw on inspiration and so do I! So no, I’m not concerned about my build up to the Olympics.” Backley who is a keen golfer then used an analogy that is obviously close to his heart - “the javelin event is like golf at the moment but with the Tiger Woods element taken out of the equation. There are a lot of people in contention for gold in Sydney. If you can get into the right momentum and start working in the right way like Vijay Singh did last year when he won the US PGA from seemingly nowhere, anyone can win! I also have the advantage that I have a championship pedigree and statistically it’s more likely that someone like me will succeed again. If you have achieved and excelled in a pressure situation and you like that environment, then you will want to experience that again.” This season three men have stood out from the rest of the world’s top throwers. Parviainen, Kostas Gatsioudis the Greek who took silver behind the Finn at last year’s World championships and Jan Zelezny the World record holder, have each thrown over 90 metres. Gatsioudis’ new personal best of 91.69 metres heads the world rankings but more of a threat to Backley’s Olympic ambitions is the fact that both Parviainen and Zelezny have had three competitions over 90 metres this summer. Backley acknowledges the significance of these performances. “I recognise that I have got to raise my game. I’m not kidding myself, I know what I have been doing this year is not enough. The minimum Sydney will be won is 87 metres which is the bare minimum and it is more likely to be won at 88 or 89 metres but not 90 metres. They are not distances that scare me. I threw 89.72m to win the European title in 1998 and I feel now that I’m in that sort of shape, there or there about. This year is just about Sydney and nothing else and I know I’ll be ready for it.” As to the specific challenge from Zelezny, Backley believes that the double Olympic champion is perhaps more of a threat than ever. “Jan has nothing to prove and his back injury probably means this will be his last year, so there is little pressure on him now. Yes, he wants the third Olympic gold but he is just enjoying the sport at the moment. Jan was as surprised as anyone that he came back last year from injury to take the World bronze. I think that comeback has given him a second wind and that makes him more dangerous than ever.” Aki Parviainen, Finland’s World champion is also highly respected by Backley. “What Aki did last year was as good a performance as there has ever been in the history of this event. To be second to a 89 metre throw and then to come back from that to throw further and beat it was amazing. Now that has never happened before with that sort of distance at a major championship. Aki is good, he can throw far and he is World champion.” It is at that point fellow Finn Heli Koivula interjects, “Aki is Finnish and he is expected to win. Javelin is athletics in Finland”… “and that” replies Backley “is his only problem. He is Finnish and five million Finns expect him to bring back gold.” Backley then continued “Parviainen’s strength is that his technique is simple and so there is very little to break down under competitive pressure. In that way technically Aki is very similar to me as a thrower…Yes, I rate him. I rate him very highly.” Besides the international challenge, what does Backley feel about the chances of his team mates Mick Hill and Nick Nieland in Sydney? “They are probably up against it! Mick Hill? Well, to an outsider I’m sure that it just looks like he is getting too old but I know that he is physically as good as he has ever been and in training he is throwing far. He just needs to put it together in competition. He has proved he is a great competitor. Nick Nieland on the other hand is at the top of his form. Throughout the year he has mostly been over 80 metres and his 85 metre personal best at the Olympic Trials shows that he should make the final. However, his record is not good having bombed out of Atlanta, Athens and Seville but he certainly has the talent to do well in Sydney.” Bringing the conversation back to Backley, I next asked Steve what were his plans after Sydney. “I love competing, going in there and battling it out. As long as I’m doing that I will be happy. I will be around for a few more years yet. Don’t be surprised if I’m on the home runway in London in 2005, I’ll be 36 years old then. By then I would like to couple my throwing with some other things, the biomechanics of the sport and possibly coaching interests me”. Yet what would his feelings be if he never managed to win that elusive World or Olympic title? Backley replied straight back, “I can’t be dissatisfied with my career can I? To have won three European gold, two Olympic medals and the world records, how could I be? Yes, I have a burning hunger for the Olympic title but if it dominates your life too much and it never comes, you’d go mad thinking about it for the rest of your life, wouldn’t you?” In Britain, we cannot conceive quite how big a news story Backley’s engagement to Heli Koivula was in javelin mad Finland. In fact the announcement of their engagement was made when the Spice Girls were in Helsinki, the Finnish capital in 1998 and even Britain’s pop sensation was knocked off the newspaper headlines by Steve and Heli. So with fiancee Heli sitting next to him, though I knew it would not be answered, the question still had to be asked. “When is the wedding day Steve?” “It’s a secret” replied Steve. Heli in response smiled coyly and laughed “yes, a secret” which allowed Steve to add “yes it’s a secret she’s keeping from me too!” So Backley has got two questions to answer this year. Will he be able to win Olympic gold and will Heli Koivula accept to marry him? Strangely enough Steve seems to be as confident about the first question as he is about the second and given the obvious attachment between this sporting couple, maybe this really could be Backley’s Olympic year after all! ENDS. Copyright. C.J. Turner 2000.